Connecting Collegiate Athletes and Fitness Consumers to Mental Health Resources [Podcast Series]

“So much of your ability to perform at a high level, whether you're in the fitness community or whether you're an athlete, really comes down to your ability to overcome mental challenges. And some of these are clinical in nature, they can be things from depression or anxiety, but a lot of them are more of like these life stressor events that, if not addressed, do become clinical issues, but still play a role in impacting kind of your ability to work out consistently and perform at this level.”

“The main issues that a lot of athletes cite of affecting them from a mental health standpoint aren't necessarily clinical in nature. They're planning for the future, academic concerns, financial worries, and it's related to their sport, but it's not like a pure sport psychology thing, like fear avoidance or something like that. And so I think it's like, how can you actually tailor these types of services so that they're more impactful for our population and not trying to be something that is kind of made for everyone.”

“There's a lot of things that go on in athletics where your peers can really offer the best insight in a lot of ways and create that sense of support system to help alleviate some of those mental concerns that you have. And so that's again, part of what we're trying to do is facilitate these other modalities besides just the clinical setting for kind of addressing some of these needs.”

“The onboarding is pretty quick, you're basically selecting kind of your main goals and challenges that you have. And then from there, we start to recommend, initially, self-guided modules. So these are all two to five minute modules that are rooted in financial literacy, nutrition, sports, psychology, mental health, they've all been created by experts in the field.”

“Now the next iteration of what we're going to do is add more direct messaging forum based things. We’ll probably include things in the onboarding where now you can actually be matched if you're a football player dealing with anxiety, well we can recommend other football players also kind of dealing with a similar challenge or a soccer player question about transfer portal, same idea. So we want to get more specified and more specific over time. But given as kind of we're younger, it's better to kind of have one really helpful community rather than a million sort of less helpful ones.”

“And so I think at the end of the day you find the most help from a lot of times your peers because you know that you can relate to and connect with them. But when I also say lived experience, I think it also comes down to not even the sport, it comes down to demographics, it comes down to economic backgrounds. And so the more that you can actually connect people that cuts through all those lived experiences, the more helpful, I think, that you're going to find them.”

“So there's new regulations that go into effect next year that the NCAA has put around student athletes. So this is more direct access to clinical care for athletes. It's programming for coaches. It's pre participation screening. It's educational aspects outside of the clinical things around like NIL and financial literacy. So what we're essentially doing in the college side is creating kind of a turnkey software solution to helping them meet all these new requirements.”

“We surveyed like 500 gym members, and over 50% of them also met with a therapist. And so like, we know that there's a lot of overlap, and people caring about mental health that also go to the gym, we know, the main reason people go to the gym now is for their mental health and to improve mood.”

“One is that we can help reduce the need for clinical care by addressing more these kind of life stressor events upstream before they become more clinical issues. But the second thing is that we really wanted to show that we can improve performance. And so much of performance is just tied to consistency, just working out consistently. And so much of that, again, is tied to your ability to overcome or inability to overcome mental health challenges.”

“How can we help kind of extend that service that they're providing to really meet people where they are when maybe the physical aspect isn't the primary thing. And so I think oftentimes, when it's not the primary thing, then people are more inclined to quit the gym and leave. But if they also have an outlet to help address kind of these other things impacting them, ideally, that would keep them more engaged, so that they would be less likely to leave is kind of the goal there.”

“And so that's another thing that we do is we have like a training course for the actual trainers of what are signs and symptoms of maybe someone is struggling with something that requires a higher level of care.”

“It seems like there is trying to be a movement to further integrate the two and a lot of it comes to like kind of bringing together experts on both sides and kind of building those relationships.”

“And so at the end of the day, you're kind of trying to develop your best existence, best version of yourself. And so that kind of is where the name stems from.”

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